Bar Dough chef Carrie Baird is hastily chopping carrots, an almost maniacal look in her eye. Is this the popular Italian restaurant in the Highland neighborhood on a busy Saturday night?

Nah, she’s in a warehouse-turned-TV-studio in Thornton on a weekday morning making grilled bruschetta for the first “Top Chef” Quickfire challenge in Colorado.

Baird, along with 15 other cheftestants (including Colorado Springs’ Brother Luck) competed on Bravo’s “Top Chef,” the Emmy award-winning culinary competition that filmed its 15th season right here in Colorado this past spring (and debuts Dec. 7, at 8 p.m.), much of it taking place inside that nondescript Thornton warehouse that has probably never before had anything so exciting happen to it.

Why Colorado?

“Top Chef” has filmed all over the country, in big and small cities alike, but this is the first time it’s come to our neck of the woods for an entire season. (Early season finales were filmed at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen.)

“Colorado has been on our radar for a long time,” said Matt Reichman, Bravo’s vice president of current production. “The producers on the show take the culinary and foodie element very, very seriously … . Colorado is in a bit of an evolution from the days when you landed in Denver and hit the mountains. There’s a growth of amazing chefs from all over the world coming here. It’s on the radar now for all of us.”

And if the state wasn’t already on the national radar, it certainly will be once the show airs. Last year’s season averaged more than 2 million viewers per episode, and it’s the No. 1 food show on cable among 25- to 54-year-olds.

Bravo executive Reichman has deep Colorado connections — he attended boarding school in Colorado Springs, majored in film studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and grew up taking ski vacations all over the state. So really the question may not be “Why Colorado?” but rather, “Why’d it take so long?”

“The people who know Colorado have always known there was amazing food and talented chefs, but now the culinary scene is really popping and people are starting to recognize Denver as a really great food destination, much like Austin, Seattle and Nashville. Denver and Colorado have been on our radar for awhile now, and this year just felt like lightning in a bottle and was the perfect time to go,” Reichman said.

Oh, and there’s also the estimated million-dollar incentive the show got for filming here. The state’s Office of Film, Television & Media was authorized to give Bravo a 20 percent cash rebate on local production costs, estimated on the show’s incentive application at $5 million. That may have played a part in getting the show to Colorado.

Ready for our close-up

In terms of putting the Colorado season together, it all happened pretty quickly. Reichman said they started casting in January and then scouted the state for potential shoot locations (including the Thornton warehouse/set and the cast house in Capitol Hill). The first day of shooting was on May 7, and the cast, crew, host Padma Lakshmi and judges Gail Simmons, Tom Colicchio and Graham Elliot traversed the state for other episodes over six weeks, ending up at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen for the finale.

With seven cameras each shooting 12 hours of footage per day and each episode taking about three days to film, there was a lot of editing to whittle down those hundreds of hours of kitchen struggles, contestant drama and Judges’ Table meltdowns to 43-minute-long episodes. That may be why it took from the mid-June taping of the finale until Dec. 7 for the show to premiere.

With 14 Colorado-set episodes, you’ll probably see a lot of faces and places you recognize. Local chefs Frank Bonanno, Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson, Jennifer Jasinski, Troy Guard, Alex Seidel, Hosea Rosenberg (who won season five of the show) and Keegan Gerhard all make appearances during the season.

These local celebrity chefs had an easy go of it, at least compared to the competing chefs. They’d stop by the studio or challenge location, eat some food and then be on their way. Meanwhile, hometown cheftestants Baird and Luck were almost constantly in the trenches, being followed, filmed and challenged for weeks on end.

“I’d always assumed it was just made for TV, like, no, they don’t really make them do that!” Baird said. “The clock, the times were real. The pressure was real, it was not staged. It was very intense and hard in every way.”

Luck, who has prior TV experience via “Chopped” and “Beat Bobby Flay” (he beat Bobby Flay), said the stress of the challenges and competition didn’t get to him as much as being locked up in the cast house and kept on a strict schedule.

“It was more the social side of it. You’re put in a situation where you’re now living with 14 strangers and you’re having your freedoms and your choices kind of dictated. People don’t see that. It’s a very confidential show. You don’t have that outside contact, you can’t just walk down to your favorite store,” Luck said.

“Tricks up our sleeve”

Spoiler alert: If you want each Colorado challenge to be a total surprise as you watch the season unfold on TV, skip this section. If, on the other hand, you’re the kind of person who sniffs out your own birthday presents and has to know everything before it happens, here’s the lowdown on some of the challenges you’ll see on the upcoming season.

The first elimination challenge was a block party in the middle of Larimer Square, where chefs were tasked with putting their own spin on meat and potatoes. (A nod to our cow-town roots.)

In Denver, there was also an Oktoberfest beer challenge at Elitch Gardens and a tailgating competition with the Broncos at Sports Authority Field at Mile High. The all-important, fan-favorite Restaurant Wars episode took place at a transformed Mile High Station.

Other challenges were filmed in Boulder, Aspen and Telluride, including a campfire cook-off in the middle of a blizzard and a veggie-centric cauldron throw-down at the Food & Wine Classic.

There will also be Denver omelets and Rocky Mountain Oysters, because of course.

What you won’t see: any marijuana-related challenges.

“There are a lot of other amazing things that are here without doing that,” Reichman said. “When people are looking for us to go left, we want to go right. We want to do the unexpected thing. We have some tricks up our sleeve.”

That “Top Chef” kitchen

It took three weeks to build the famous “Top Chef” kitchen/set in the Thornton warehouse, filled with candy apple red KitchenAids, rows of pots and pans, stainless steel tables, sous vide stations, pallets of water bottles (enough to last months in the case of “Top Chef” Armageddon) and vats of liquid nitrogen almost as tall as Lakshmi herself.

The “pantry” — really just makeshift metal racks — was lined with home-state products like Savory Spice blends, Grateful Bread loaves and local beers like Avery and Oskar Blues. Its contents changed depending on the day’s Quickfire or elimination challenge.

Lakshmi and the judges got camera-ready in shipping container dressing rooms just feet away from the kitchen set-up. Judges’ Table — where a contestant is eliminated each episode — also took place here.

All of this was built into this unassuming Thornton warehouse typically occupied by Northern Electric, Inc., a full-service electrical contractor that plans, designs and builds projects all around the country. It was the first time it had been used as a TV studio.

Also in the Thornton warehouse was “Top Chef” command central, or, as the Bravo TV-making folks called it, Video Village. The Village was a cramped, dim production room that at any given time was filled with 25 producers, directors and other people telling Lakshmi what to say to the contestants competing steps away on set.

Whether you’re already a “Top Chef” super-fan or just curious how Colorado’s food scene looks on national television, the wait is almost over. “Top Chef” Colorado premieres on Bravo on Thursday, Dec. 7, at 8 p.m.

If you forget to set your DVR, we’ll be posting re-caps after each episode airs, filling you in on the local people, places and things highlighted on the show, as well as keeping tabs on how our Colorado contestants do. We’ll also have some behind-the-scenes looks at filming, just in case you’ve always wondered how the food really tastes and how the network keeps the finalists under wraps.

How she got on the show: “Top Chef” reached out to her after former “Top Chef Masters” contestant Jennifer Jasinski (Rioja, Stoic & Genuine, Ultreia) mentioned what a great meal she’d had from Baird.

How she’s feeling about being seen by millions of people: “I’ve never seen myself on TV before. I’m nervous. I don’t know why they chose me, but I’m so glad they did.”

Would she do it again? “I don’t know. There have been so many good things that came out of it — the friends I made and seeing my state and town in a different light. It was very stressful and very hard to be away from home for that amount of time.”

“Top Chef” contestant Brother Luck preps a meal during a shoot for the new season. (Paul Trantow, provided by Bravo)

Name: Brother Luck (yes, that’s his given name)

Current position/restaurant: Chef/owner of Four by Brother Luck

City: Colorado Springs

Colorado résumé: Cheyenne Mountain Resort, The Craftwood Inn

How he got on the show: Luck auditioned (unsuccessfully) three times for past seasons of the show. A casting director even told him that they didn’t take hotel chefs and that he didn’t have what it takes to be on. “It put a chip on my shoulder,” he said. Then, last year, he traveled through China and a reporter did a story on his experience. A different casting director saw that story and reached out to Luck about being on “Top Chef.” Take that, original naysaying casting director.

How he’s feeling about being seen by millions of people: “I’m so excited. I think for me I’m very comfortable with who I am, my story, my background, and I’m comfortable sharing it. I hope that comes across in that direction. It’s an opportunity to inspire, to connect.”

Would he do it again? “I would do it again. I had a lot of fun. I learned so much about myself, just by putting myself out there.”

“Last Chance Kitchen”

“Top Chef” fans know that Judges’ Table isn’t always the end of the road for contestants. “Last Chance Kitchen,” viewable online at bravotv.com, is a chance for eliminated chefs to fight their way back onto the show through another culinary competition. This year’s LCK was filmed here in Colorado inside the Thornton warehouse-turned-studio, except there was (of course!) a twist: four “Top Chef” veterans returned to compete against this season’s eliminated contestants. Jennifer Carroll, Kwame Onwuachi, Marcel Vigneron and Lee Anne Wong try to out-cook the Colorado cheftestants to grab a spot in the finale. Follow online to see who’s asked to pack their knives and go.

Allyson Reedy is first and foremost an eater. While her affinity for food was detrimental to her dreams of modeling swimwear, it helps her tremendously when writing about local restaurants for the Denver Post.